Bites from other Blogs

Peanut butter cookies fans are probably all familiar with Nutter Butters, peanut butter-filled peanut butter cookies that are actually shaped like peanuts. They have a salty-sweet quality that can make them very addictive. Bake at 350 made a variation on that grocery store favorite, with Homemade Chocolate-Filled Nutter Butters. These cookies are sandwiched with chocolate ganache and drizzled with peanut butter icing. It’s a twist worth trying, especially if you want to play around with a homemade version of these.

There is no reason that coffee cakes need to be stuck in a cinnamon flavored rut (although cinnamon is very tasty). Take the Lime Scented Pull Apart Coffee Cake from Une Gamine Dans La Cuisine. The coffee cake is feather light and loaded with bright, tangy lime flavor. While other coffee cakes can feel heavy, this is the type of cake that will perk you up – not to mention leave you reaching for more. The yeast dough is layered with a flavorful lime and sugar paste before baking, so that flavor can get into all the nooks and crannies of the bread, and it is served with a lime cream cheese glaze.

Pie usually only appears at breakfast as leftovers, but there is no reason that pie can’t make it onto a brunch menu when there is so much ripe fruit in season just waiting to become a pie. Foodess‘s Strawberry Hand Pies with Cream Cheese Pastry are perfect breakfast pies. They’re single serving, so they’re easy to eat and serve, and they have a very simple filling that takes no time to put together. The cream cheese pastry is much easier to work with than your typical pie dough, too.

Do you know what a pizzookie is? It is a big chocolate chip cookie that is baked in an oven-safe baking dish and served, still hot, with a scoop of ice cream on top. It’s kind of a silly name, but the dessert is homey and very satisfying. 6 Bittersweets cooked up a Browned Butter Pizzokie, with lots of toasty browned butter, and packed it full of chocolate chips and pecans. Browned Butter is easy to make, if you haven’t tried it yourself, and really takes these cookies (or any others) to the next level in terms of flavor. Vanilla ice cream is the perfect topper, as it lets all those delicious flavors come right out of the warm cookie dough.

It’s always nice to see a variation on a classic and Culinary Chronicles‘s Red Velvet Shortbread Cookies are a great spin-off on the red velvet cupcakes that see to be so prevalent these days. These cookies have a bit of cocoa powder in them to give them that same hint of cocoa you’ll find in red velvet cake, and enough red food coloring to give them their beautiful color. Since cream cheese frosting doesn’t really work too well on a shortbread cookie, these are dipped in white chocolate for some extra sweetness and to give them a finished look before serving.

4 comments

Great blog – saw your on the top 50 list of baking blogs! Great work! I have a cupcake blog and would love to get your feedback on some of my recipes. Feel free to stop by” Stay Calm, Have a Cupcake” at http://www.fontgirl.wordpress.com.